Join The Community
Femmebot RPG Stellar Blade is much more infamous for its protagonist's out-of-place bikinis than it is renowned for its post-apocalyptic story, but game director Kim Hyung-tae hopes a possible sequel will rectify that.
In an interview – first noticed by Genki on Twitter – with Korean news site This is Game, Hyung-tae seems to acknowledge that Stellar Blade features a lackluster story, though he says this was due to development constraints rather than intention.
We translated the interview using DeepL; Hyung-tae agrees with the interviewer in saying that Stellar Blade has a "lack of story," but he also says that Korean developer Shift Up originally wanted to explain more of its razed Earth than it ultimately had time for. For example: early in Stellar Blade's production, Shift Up planned to design cutscenes around "why the main character changes clothes." But this was an expensive ambition.
As Stellar Blade development progressed further, Shift Up was "forced" to remove any nonessential cutscenes so that it actually had time to finish the game. Hyung-tae seems to partially blame this regrettable fact on what he perceives to be a limited game dev workforce in Korea; there's no "fully established development talent pool or system for narrative-centered games," he tells This is Game.
Regardless, though Hyung-tae hesitates to retroactively pad Stellar Blade's lore for the sake of fans' personal ideas about the game, he says Shift Up will focus on delivering a more "rich" story in the sequel – "if we are given the opportunity to make the next one."
The existence of Stellar Blade 2 was seemingly outed as part of a recent Shift Up financial report, but until it's officially announced, you can likely fill lifetimes with the number of NSFW mods that have popped up following the game's recent Steam release. Narrative isn't everything – beauty helps, too.
